The 11th Hour Review

DiCaprio's documentary offers some powerful insights about our effect on the environment.

Leonardo DiCaprio recently made a comment to the effect of, the key to escaping media attention is to bore photographers and tabloid scribes with scoops that no one cares about. The sad truth is he may just have found the perfect subject for avoiding most or all conventional coverage &#Array; namely, the environment. In the new documentary The 11th Hour, the acclaimed actor explores some of the most dangerous threats to our planet, and in so doing offers some of the most depressing and hopeless facts about the human race ever reported. Thankfully, he also provides more than a few suggestions and solutions for redeeming our wasteful ways and repairing our damaged planet. But by then, one expects that the audience &#Array; as opposed to the shutterbugs and supermarket pundits &#Array; will be the only ones watching&#Array; which is definitely a good thing.

Featuring a cross section of experts, The 11th Hour essentially deconstructs each and every way human beings are depleting the Earth's natural resources. Unlike, say, An Inconvenient Truth, which focuses largely on global warming, the film takes a more comprehensive approach to our environmental offenses, including the effects of industrialization, war, and conspicuous consumption. Finally, the film offers a few suggestions as to how we can be more conscious of the world around us, and provides a feeling of hope that we can actually repair some of this damage and preserve the planet for future generations.

Other than its understandable if sometimes deafening pessimism about our collective environmental consciousness, the film's one shortcoming is the presence of DiCaprio, who offers scripted interludes that bridge together different segments of the film. If he merely narrated as Al Gore did with An Inconvenient Truth, The 11th Hour might seem a little stronger in its arguments, or at least more objective. But DiCaprio's visible participation renders the film a pet project by a Hollywood power player, rather than an earnest document of a vitally important issue.

That said, there are more than a few undeniable truths in the film, and it almost certainly will convert a large number of audience members to consider ways that they can reduce their output of waste material and/or help replenish natural resources. The comments and observations made by a panel of educated interviewees &#Array; including Mikhail Gorbachev, Stephen Hawking, and former CIA director James Woolsey &#Array; are as terrifying as they are inspiring, and very rightly observe that our feelings that we can conquer nature (much less our own nature) are not only ill-informed but desperately naive.

Overall, this is just as important (if not more so) a film as Gore's was last year, and it reflects an increasing effort to highlight the political and environmental issues that will be at the forefront of this generation's thinking in the years to come. The 11th Hour is a very good movie, and its message absolutely deserves to be heard; let's just hope that in his efforts to escape the media's attention, DiCaprio hasn't situated himself in a place that will not only overshadow his celebrity, but the far more important messages that he wants the media to see instead.